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A Personal View of "Ma Vie en Rose"
Je Regarde ma Jeunesse,
en Rose (I Consider my Youth, in Pink)
By Emily Alford
Last night, as I write this, I saw Alain Berliner's film MA VIE EN ROSE
(MY LIFE IN PINK). Some TGF readers may have seen the very favorable
review it received last autumn in the New York Times. Others may have
have read the equally good notice in Variety, which TG Forum reprinted. At
least one paper where I live (Dallas), has already given it the kind of
notice for which a filmmaker prays. The film is Berliner's first and almost
certainly it introduces a major talent. MA VIE won the "Best Foreign
Language Film" Golden Globe, and quite possibly it will win other awards.
It's on the art-cinema circuit, and I cannot be strong enough in urging
everybody in the transgender community to see it.
What follows is not another review, in the conventional sense, but an
attempt to describe how the film hit me, hard. First, a synopsis. A
middle-class family is giving a housewarming party for itself in a
Leave-it-to-Beaver French suburb, probably in the Paris region, where
they have just arrived. The neighbors gather, and the new arrivals
introduce themselves, including seven year-old Ludovic (Georges du
Fresne), whom we have glimpsed putting on his makeup and adjusting his
skirt. (I will use he and his entirely, because we are never given a
femme name).
The family have known and tolerated his childish cross-dressing, but when he
appears before the new neighbors as what he knows himself to be, it becomes a
public problem. Not the least of it is the clear mutuality between Ludo and
the son of his father's boss and new neighbor. Ludo is completely out of
control; he knows he is a girl inside and that is the only truth that counts.
But his truth causes huge difficulties, at his school, in the neighborhood,
for himself, within his family, and for his family. Eventually, the whole
family are driven out, his father having lost his job. Moving to
Clermont-Ferrand, in the Massif Central, and taking a downward social leap,
they reestablish themselves. Ludo finds a friend in somebody crossing the
gender frontier the other way, and the film resolves.
As I summarize, so very much is missing. There are wish sequences and
special effects to which every transgender person will relate. My
favorite comes when Ludo's sympathetic grandmother invites him to resolve his
problems by closing his eyes and imagining another world. Instantly, the
tormented boy is a real girl, in a pretty summer dress. The expression of
surprise and delight that du Fresne brings to Ludo's face at that moment is
wonderful. Perhaps the most witty follows Ludo's older sister's explanation
that two X's make a girl and an X and a Y make a boy. No problem for Ludo.
In God's book it was written that Ludo should be a girl, but one of the X's
got lost as it descended, and the problems began. It's "purely scientific"
and it expresses the combination of incomprehension and a yearning to
understand that a young transgender necessarily feels. To my mind, these
points are a lot more striking than the intervention of a Barbie-figure at
other magical moments. As my local reviewer comments, "You don't have to be a
transsexual . . . to appreciate . . . Ma Vie en Rose, but it certainly
helps."
Ma Vie en Rose is about essence, about what we feel ourselves to be,
beyond all explanation. Taken this way, Ludo is an utterly perfect
primary transsexual, born a boy but rejecting it from the first moment of
consciousness, if not before. (To the huge credit of the Netherlands, it is
now official policy there to take such people through transition as young and
as fast as possible, assuming that is what they want.) Ludo knows what he
should have been, wants it, accepts the implications, and, finally, wins out,
among his family. With that self-recognition and that acceptance (however
painful it was to acquire) there is only one possible future, though that is
left unstated at the film's end.
Being somebody who has long maintained a desperate balance on the gender
line, I've thought sometimes that it would have been easier to be like Ludo,
just plain sure. But the degree to which he suffers is enormous. As I sat in
the cinema waiting for the screening, I looked for other transgender people.
I saw none, which may be a tribute to other people's abilities, or may
reflect the actual audience. Living publicly male, I was not dressed myself.
During the screening, two qualities struck me about my fellow viewers. One
was the nervous laughter during the scenes that were played for comedy
(although I did not laugh at all). The other quality was a deep, engaged
silence, as the film moved into the torment experienced by Ludo and by the
people around him. There was a very real sense of audience empathy as the
fully-realized characters on screen worked out they are forced to feel. When
the film resolved, with the recognition that Ludo is what Ludo is, and with
the family re-established around that fact, the audience relief was palpable.
I always sit through credits, simply to let myself rejoin the non-film
world, and I noticed that an awful lot of other people did as well.
Ma Vie en Rose shook me, deeply. When I left the cinema I walked several
miles, simply to dispell the tensions and the self-recognitions that it had
created within me. My own youth in secret pink took place more than four
decades ago, and there was no Alain Berliner then to interpret it. But at the
very moment I was experiencing my own first undeniable transgender desires, a
very brave George Jorgensen was deciding that he could not bear any longer to
go on being what the chromosones we call X and Y had condemned him to be. I
knew about George becoming Christine; I was six, one year younger than the
film's Ludo. I was fascinated and terrified, but at least I was not
completely alone.
We transgendered people have come a long way since then. Every one of us in
our childhood has probably felt both as alone and as compelled as Ludo, or
the young George Jorgensen, or the six year old me. The facts that Berliner
could make so powerful a film and that it could be received so favorably is
the clearest evidence of the difference between then and now.
But that is only a marker of how far there still is to go, so that a real
seven year old who knows that what he appears to be is not what she really is
need not suffer, as does this film's marvelously created and marvelously
realized central character. As have so many people who ought to see this
splendid film.
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